As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story, there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the _Endimion_ of John Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with
--that night-wandering, pale, and watery star, When yawning dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky, Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits.
So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call--
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion, And would not be awaked,
uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the invocation near the end of Spenser's _Epithalamion_, or the reference to 'pale-changeful Cynthia' and her Endymion in Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_;[2] or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the masque in the _Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe, by Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, that tedious, absurd, exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed Keats's ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton before him.
Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been? Or whither go'st thou? Here be Woods as green As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet, As where smooth _Zephyrus_ plays on the fleet Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any; Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells, Arbors o'rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells, Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing, Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love, How the pale _Phoebe_ hunting in a Grove, First saw the Boy _Endymion_, from whose Eyes She took eternal fire that never dyes: How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light, To kiss her sweetest.